Once a Rake (Drake's Rakes) (19 page)

Chapter 9

The earth didn’t move. The stars didn’t tremble. Ian didn’t even notice that Sarah’s life had convulsed around her. At least she prayed he didn’t. Because loving him changed nothing. Except that she didn’t know what to do with the maelstrom of feelings that swept through her.

She had never had the chance to really love someone before. Not like this, with a sweet, deep emotion. With joy and grief and the most alien sense of possession. She had never been allowed to. An orphan belonged to no one. Certainly not the father who refused to acknowledge his mistake. Not the staff at an overcrowded orphanage, or the couple who never let her forget that they had only taken her away out of Christian duty.

Even her friends had never quite belonged to her. She loved them, certainly. She thought they had loved her. But she had walked into that school knowing she had to protect herself from becoming too close.

And yet six days with Ian Ferguson and she was completely lost.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t love her; he couldn’t, after all. He was too honorable to allow it. He was betrothed to someone else, his promise inviolate. But she loved him. She was connected to him, entwined with him. Suddenly without ever meaning to, he had invited her to join life. To participate. To belong.

To
belong.
To be part of something, of someone. To join hands and step into a dance she had, for so long, only watched. To recklessly, ruthlessly, fearlessly open herself to him and let him in.

She should run. Escape before she reached a place from which she couldn’t retreat. Before the life she lived lost its worth.

And yet she stayed. She refused to flee from him. Instead she lay down beside him and wrapped him in her arms, as if she could cushion the blows he suffered. When he wept, sobbing his sisters’ names, she wept with him. And when he crushed her to him, she burrowed her face against his neck and stroked his tangled hair. She felt him shudder in her arms and gathered him to her, closer than comfort, closer than friendship, closer than love. Which was how she truly lost her way. Because when she could think of no other way to comfort him, she lifted her face and she kissed him.

It was something she had done before, after all. She had never given her whole self to Boswell, but she had known how to comfort him. She had kissed her husband when he was at his most despairing, and she knew it had sometimes brought him peace.

This kiss began in the same way. With closeness. Companionship. Compassion.

It changed instantaneously. The first touch of his soft mouth against hers left her reeling. Lightning struck. Lightning and smoke and sunlight, all caught in a simple touch. Life. Passion, madness, joy. She didn’t know how it happened, but suddenly she was wrapped in his arms, both of them trembling, both seeking, mouth and tongue and teeth, desperate to get closer, as if they could climb inside each other. As if they would both die unless they could share this primal force. She tangled her hands in his hair to hold on. He ran his great, gentle hands down her body.

Contact. Communion, comfort. A maelstrom of need and heat and pain metamorphosed into light by a touch, a kiss, the entwining of two bodies. Her body glowed and glittered and hummed. Her breasts ached, suddenly tender and full. Her skin seemed to have a life of its own. She swore if she looked in a mirror, she would gleam like starshine.

And oh, was this what it was like to want? To feel a hunger deep inside you, to the core of your womb? His hands moved erratically, as if he could hardly imagine he swept them along her hip, her thigh, the edge of her ribs. His mouth burned her throat, her shoulder, the swell of her breast, and she suddenly wanted that mouth everywhere. She wanted him to brand her with his touch so that no one else could ever claim her.

She wanted to
belong
to him. She wanted a connection so deep that he would fight for her as hard as he had his sisters. She couldn’t imagine that kind of loyalty, that kind of raw, simple faith in another human. She would have given everything to have one person in her life who would have searched for her. To have
this
person, this driven, imperfect, loyal man follow her to hell to find her. Even if she didn’t belong to him.

That one stray thought restored her senses. From one second to the next she passed from delirium to cold, stark sense.

The minute they stepped out of this cellar, their paths would part. He would return to his sisters and his fiancée and his life, and he would do great things. Sometimes he would remember his sister’s friend, the one who had sheltered him, and he would tell amusing stories about her pig and a little estate on the south coast. Sarah would love him, though, forever. She would carry this exquisite pain with her where she went. She would tuck the memories away somewhere safe like petals pressed in poetry, so that when life grew too hard, or too lonely, she could pull them out and refresh herself with their scent. Because she would be alone again, to make it through as best as she knew how.

Gently she disentangled herself from him. She held her breath, half afraid he would wake and wonder why she lay in his arms. He didn’t. He was quiet again, his features relaxed in sleep. She ached to return to his arms, to fold herself against him, arm around arm, cheek to shoulder, heart hearing heart. It was to comfort him, she assured herself. To offer contact with someone who understood. To do a kindness.

She was lying and she knew it. Tears slid down her cheeks again, but this time not for him. They fell as she climbed off the camp bed and as she reclaimed her seat on a nearby crate. They continued to fall until the sun came up and the nightmares fled. And they fell as she picked herself up and crept alone back to the house.

London

At four o’clock in the afternoon, White’s was thin of company. Only Alvanley and Poodle Byng occupied the bow window, quizzing glasses raised as they commented on the gentlemen passing up St. James Street. A few older members dozed over newspapers in the reading room, and a dozen or so men sat over various card games. None looked up when the front door opened. Bets were being laid, which was more important.

“You owe me a pony.”

Four gentlemen looked up from their hand of whist. Only Marcus Drake saw sharp interest flaring in the eyes of his fellow Rakes as he handed off his hat to the footman and strolled grinning into the nearly deserted card room, twirling his Malacca cane.

“Well, you’re looking like the cat who’s cleaning feathers from his chin,” Beau Drummond greeted him, his usually severe features amused.

“A bottle of claret,” Drake told the hovering waiter, who immediately turned and left. “With what strength I have left, I am celebrating.”

A few men at a table on the far side of the room briefly looked up from their cards and smiled. Drake dragged a chair over and placed it next to Knight.

“A small matter,” he announced to the room at large as he settled into the seat with the elegance of a big cat. “A new and innovative use by my mistress of silk cords. These clodpoles said it couldn’t be done. Well, I am here to tell the tale.”

“Ah,” one of men at another table sighed. “La Paloma. Most creative practitioner in the demimonde. Once saw her make use of a swing and a piccolo . . .”

Glasses were lifted in the lady’s honor before play resumed.

“Ian?” Alex Knight murmured as Drake seated himself.

“Alive and well.”

“Begad,” Chuffy Wilde laughed softly, and pulled off his glasses for a good wipe. “I’ll gladly pay up. I counted him out this time. Man’s got more lives than a ferret.”

“Not a ferret, Chuff,” Beau Drummond said behind a lazy smile. “A cat’s the one with nine lives. I don’t think ferrets have more than one.”

“You sure, Beau?” Chuffy dispensed a particularly sweet frown. “Don’t know why. Sly nasty things, cats. Like ferrets better. Like birds, come to that. Always chirpin’ and flittin’ about—’til a cat gets ’em, anyway. But then, like Ferguson best of all.”

Drake smiled complacently, as if he would be happy to hear Chuffy rattle on all day rather than impart his news. The waiter returned and poured out a glass for each man before leaving the bottle and silently departing. Sips were taken with smug smiles and a loudly conveyed suggestion or two for other tricks Drake’s mistress might try.

“How ’bout the noose trick?” Alex Knight asked, his voice lowered as he contemplated his cards. “Are we to be spared seeing Ian attempt it?”

“Not if we have anything to say to the matter.” Frowning, Drake laid a hand on Knight’s black-banded arm. “I thank you for running down to London, Knight. Can’t have been easy.”

All the other men nodded, acknowledging the death five months earlier of Knight’s wife of four years. Knight nodded back. “I’d rather be productive, if it’s all the same to you. A friend in need is the perfect excuse.”

“He didn’t do it, of course,” the gently rotund Chuffy insisted, shoving a guinea into the center of the table. “Ferguson. Silly idea.”

Postures relaxing, the other four men gladly moved away from tragedy.

“Indeed, Chuff,” Drake agreed, sitting back with glass in hand. “However, we still lack proof. Ian asks an audience to mount his defense. He did give us a name, though. Stricker. Anyone know him? Seems he was in possession of a certain flask.”

That quickly the tension returned. “Flask?” Alex asked. “I thought Horse Guards had it.”

Drake sighed. “
Had
being the operative word. After getting his missive, I checked out the matter, and found it to be mysteriously missing.”

“Devil a bit,” the fourth member of the group drawled, managing to look outraged and uninterested at once. Only Nate Adams’s usually languid black eyes gave him away. “Know Stricker. Bright new face at Horse Guards. Some relation of Jersey’s.”

Drake’s head came up. “Horse Guards, huh? Well now, doesn’t this get cozy?”

Drake turned to Chuffy. “What do you say, Chuff?”

Chuffy laid down a card. “Stricker? Don’t think I’m related to him.” He sounded surprised, which was understandable. Chuffy was related to most of the
ton.

Adams downed his glass in one swallow and poured another. “Better get Stricker in fast. You know how much his compatriots like their members to be found out.”

“Where is our lost lamb?” Alex asked, plucking bills from his stack.

Drake sipped at his wine and observed the room. “Wouldn’t say. South coast somewhere, I assume. I’m to send a reply at the Lyme post office to let him know arrangements for bringing him in.”

“Lyme?” Chuffy asked, peering up from his cards. “Happy coincidence. Was just about to tell you. Been invited to a house party given in honor of our blessed Princess Charlotte. Down near Cerne Abbas. No more than a toad’s leap from Lyme.”

“Didn’t think toads could jump that far,” Nate Adams drawled.

 “Prodigious jumpers,” Chuffy assured him with another ineffectual push at his glasses, which kept sliding down his nose. “Once won a monkey on Toadkins. Pet, you know. Prodigious jumper.”

 Alex nodded his dark head. “I remember Toadkins. You kept him in your pocket during class. Bloody well gave the venerable Patricks a seizure when the old boy landed in his lunch.”

 Chuffy shook his head slowly. “Bit of a prig, Patricks,” he said. “Preferred Stevens. Amphibian man, all the way. All that time in swamps, I imagine.”

 “Well, don’t take the toad down to the weekend,” Drake advised. “Women are notoriously unimpressed by things that eat flies. Might throw the princess off her food.”

 “A real stick is the princess,” Chuffy defended her. “Met Toadkins. Called him delightful. Can’t bring him anyway, you know. Dead. Buried in m’ father’s snuffbox in the back garden.”

 The three men broke out laughing. “Your father’s snuffbox?”

 Chuffy didn’t so much as look up from his cards. “Mater didn’t like it. Risky scenes painted on the inside. Naked ladies and all.”

 “I think that’s risqué,” Beau offered. “Not risky.”

 Chuffy gave him a look over his glasses. “Risky for m’ father when my mother saw it. Better to bury a toad in it.”

 When they finally stopped laughing, Drake lifted his glass. “To the princess,” he said. “Chuffy, who will you take along?”

 “Alex?” Chuffy asked.

 Alex Knight sighed. “I already have an invitation. My sister Pippin is good friends with the duke’s sister Elizabeth.”

 “Good,” Drake said. “We can kill two birds with one stone. Find our lost lamb and keep an eye on our princess. Keep me apprised.”

 “Should we speak with the princess?” Alex asked. “Put a flea in her ear?”

 Drake didn’t need to think on it. “Too soon. She might give away the game.”

 “She would, too,” Chuffy said. “Not treated well by that family, but loyal to the bone. Would be out for blood.”

 The others nodded. “Well, see who has her ear.”

 “That’s easy,” Alex said. “Mercer Elphinstone. Thick as inkleweavers. I think she was the one talked the princess into that indiscretion with her cousin.”

 “See if you can learn anything new,” Drake suggested. “Anyone…oh, you know what to look for. You’ve done this long enough.”

 Standing, he downed his wine with a wink to his friends. “Enough rest,” he announced to the room at large. “A man doesn’t keep La Paloma waiting for long. I’ll expect your notes, gentlemen.”